The country’s fifth medical school is scheduled to open in October 2011 with 127 new students in two tracks on the Ziv Medical Center campus in Safed.

The Rambam Institute is designed to serve the medical, as well as the religious Yemenite community. Here we will have books, articles and other research media available to use when studying medical and ethical questions that arise in the field of medicine and how halacha is applied to those questions. We will make our space available for not only researchers, but also will provide speakers and sponsor lectures where students and others in the community can hear of the newest dilemmas facing medical ethics. This arrives on the heels of huge medical progress in the world, and as this happens, new religious and ethical questions and objections arise; examples such as decisions to end the use of breathing machines, administering medications which are doubtful extenders of life, the use of animals in medical research, genetic cloning, and more.

What the institute will keep foremost when examining such dilemmas and others, is the relationship of Torah and to the impact on the family, relative to medical solutions offered. Therefore, experts in fields, medicine and Torah use the standard, “to Live in them, not to die in them. וחי בהם- ולא שימות בהם

The Rambam Institute will also offer to the public and to the students of the medical school, lectures from the best in the fields of medicine and rabbinic’s, exploring the ethical and halacha dilemmas suggested above. Lectures will also include tours of the medical college facilities and other relative locations.

The medical school in Tzfat is the first to open in Israel since Ben-Gurion University’s Faculty of Health Sciences in 1974, will train 200 much-needed physicians within four years at an investment of NIS 130 million – giving a big boost to the Galilee and to nearby hospitals where the students will undergo clinical instruction . The Safed medical school will be headed by Prof. Ran Tur-Kaspa, vice dean of Tel Aviv University’s Sackler School of Medicine and an internist who is a liver expert.

The El Shabazi Center is directly next door to the ongoing construction site for this medical school. An entrance from the Rambam Institute, directly into the school itself, is in the architectural design, offering convenience to the students, also by way of also providing a shul to those who wish to take advantage of the close proximity to their learning by attending our minyans.